An annoying saga about a house full of pests.
A naturalist’s memoir of living in an old barn in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.
Meyer’s conservationist views are of the homespun variety. She and her lover, Patrick, purchase an abandoned 75-year-old dairy barn while participating in the reenactment of a pioneer wagon train. The barn is a perfect site for Patrick’s trade (horseshoeing), while the author is thrilled at the thought of writing a memoir about being thrilled with living in the barn, which is full of critters of all different sorts. Meyer and Patrick don’t necessarily want to exterminate the flies, mice, bats, and skunks with whom they share their abode. (When she sets off a pesticide bomb in the barn, killing thousands of flies, she does so against Patrick’s wishes and feels guilty about it.) Rather, the couple learns how to live with the beasts, becoming nouveau–mountain people, learning even to love the smell of skunk musk (which the author finds sexually arousing). Meyer’s reasoning will cause some, if not most, readers to roll their eyes, and her constant shunning of convenience in the interests of nature grows tiresome as the memoir progresses. She convinces herself that killing mice with traps is okay, for example, only because their overwhelming numbers stem from a steady supply of man-made food. She also engages in a personal boycott of products with already-harvested huckleberries because there is a huckleberry shortage and the black bears have little else to eat. Meyer’s heart is in the right place, of course. When a bear cub senselessly dies, we witness a tragedy; hunters have killed its parents and a game warden’s tranquilizers have killed it. But soon after, when Meyer breaks down and writes “I was crying then for myself, crying the pain of impotence in a fast-hurtling world,” her sophistry again rears its ugly head and our sympathy ebbs. Passages devoted to a fishing trip in which Hemingway is invoked also try the patience.
An annoying saga about a house full of pests.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50438-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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